Incron is a daemon which monitors filesystem events and executes commands defined in system and user tables. It can be installed on all major linux distributions using each distribution’s default package manager.

Why I needed it?

I’m using as a web server for my vps server. That being said, the web root folder where I add files to be accessible via web, due to security reasons it has ownership as: 750 mode for folders and 640 for files. Since I do a lot of copying from one server to another, usually the files that I copy from another server to my server, have a default ownership of root:root (since I login via ssh with a regular user, then sudo su – (too damn lazy to add sudo before every command).

If I want to download that file from my own server via HTTP let’s say, I have run chown nginx:nginx file (otherwise I’ll get a read error because of the ownership). And this can become annoying sometimes. So I was looking for some sort of solution to be able do that automatically. To be more specific, if a new file is created or copied in my web root folder, then to automatically execute chown nginx:nginx file command. I played a little bit with the inotify-tools and inotify-wait but I didn’t like it entirely. Then I decided to use incron.

The syntax is pretty similar with the one from cron (crontab).

The format is as follows:

<path> <mask> <command /></mask></path>

where can be a directory (meaning the directory and/or the files directly in that directory (not files in subdirectories of that directory!) are watched) or a file.

Operations:

IN_ACCESS           File was accessed (read) (*)
IN_ATTRIB           Metadata changed (permissions, timestamps, extended attributes, etc.) (*)
IN_CLOSE_WRITE      File opened for writing was closed (*)
IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE    File not opened for writing was closed (*)
IN_CREATE           File/directory created in watched directory (*)
IN_DELETE           File/directory deleted from watched directory (*)
IN_DELETE_SELF      Watched file/directory was itself deleted
IN_MODIFY           File was modified (*)
IN_MOVE_SELF        Watched file/directory was itself moved
IN_MOVED_FROM       File moved out of watched directory (*)
IN_MOVED_TO         File moved into watched directory (*)
IN_OPEN             File was opened (*)

Command takes the following arguments:

$$   dollar sign
$@   watched filesystem path (see above)
$#   event-related file name
$%   event flags (textually)
$&   event flags (numerically)

For more information please consult the program’s man page.

So let’s take this scenario for example:

• web root folder is /var/www/html.

I want to monitor that folder and if a file is copied there, modified, created, edited etc, when that happens, incron will automatically execute /usr/bin/chown nginx:nginx file.

That can be achieved like that:

incrontab -e

Then add the entry bellow and save:

/var/www/html   IN_MODIFY     /usr/bin/chown nginx:nginx "$@/$#"

Now if a new file is created/edited/modified/copied to the /var/www/html/ folder the /usr/bin/chown nginx:nginx file command will be automatically executed for that specific file/folder.

Pretty simple isn’t it?